Cracked, CBC’s new procedural starring David Sutcliffe as a stressed-out 12-year Toronto police veteran reassigned to the department’s psychological crimes unit, reaches the one-month mark with tonight’s episode, White Knight. Det. Aidan Black (Sutcliffe) has never really recovered from a traumatic incident on the job, years earlier, when he shot and killed two people. The department’s internal affairs division cleared him of wrongdoing, but he’s still prone to flashbacks and freezing in the line of duty.

That creates problems in Tuesday’s episode, when he comes to aid of a woman, played by Kathleen Robertson (Boss), whose windshield is being bashed in by a crazed homeless person with a long history of violence.

What happens from there is a little predictable and trite, though no more predictable or trite than an average episode of CSI from the current season.

The real reason to watch Cracked, and what may earn it pickup for a second season once these first 13 episodes have aired, is the acting.

As the title suggests, Cracked is a character study of one man’s struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder. And while Cracked has a credible ensemble cast in supporting roles — Stefanie von Pfetten as the departmental psychiatrist who’s both minder and Aidan’s partner-in-crime-fighting; Luisa D’Oliveira as the young, ambitious detective looking for advancement, etc. — it’s Sutcliffe who must shoulder most of Cracked’s burden.

Sutcliffe, who played the recurring role of Lauren Graham’s ex-husband for seven seasons on the late, lamented family drama Gilmore Girls, has an easy, understated presence. He underplays rather than overplays, which is fitting for a character whose deepest wounds are on the inside, not where everyone can see them.

Tuesday’s episode touches on a number of mental-health issues, from survivor guilt to inappropriate behaviour in the workplace to that old reliable, sexual attraction between consenting adults — the emphasis on consenting.

If much of the background on-the-job detail seems realistic, that’s because Cracked’s co-creator and lead consultant is Calum de Hartog, one of about 100 officers with Toronto’s Emergency Task Force, a kind of real-life Flashpoint rapid response team. In his police career de Hartog has talked emotionally disturbed people out of committing suicide, served high-risk arrest warrants and was one of the officers on the scene at last summer’s Toronto Danzig St. block party in which two people died and more than 20 others wounded.

While some of Tuesday’s episode’s plot twists rely too heavily on coincidence — what are the odds, you may find yourself asking — Cracked is still is a reasonably engaging hour of entertainment. It gets the background details right, and Sutcliffe is believable in the part, even if the story isn’t always believable. (CBC, 9 ET/PT)

Three to See

• Never mind Danzig St. The ever-cheerful Rick Mercer takes in a sunnier side of TO with a Rick Mercer Report in which the restless raconteur feels the magic of Toronto’s Famous People Players theatre company and gets jiggy with their black light show. Now we’re talkin’. (CBC, 8 ET/PT)

• Will the mysteries never end? BBM figures show that NCIS: Los Angeles scored more than 2.5 million viewers and was the second most-watched program on Canadian TV over Christmas week — behind NCIS. So somebody must be watching this thing. In Tuesday’s outing, Callen (Chris O’Donnell) infiltrates a network of Chechen terrorists who are recruiting foreign fighters to join their just and noble cause, which involves attacking U.S. interests and giving the infidels what for. At least their ringleader isn’t Canadian. (Global, CBS, 9 ET/PT, 10 MT)

• The often nostalgic if occasionally superficial Pioneers of Television looks back in fondness at TV’s superheroes of yesteryear, and makes one weep for the days when Batman was played by Adam West and not that scruffy, woe-is-me, post-millennial Hamlet wannabe. Who, having seen her, can ever forget Julie Newmar as Catwoman. Little known fact: After playing Catwoman for two seasons Newmar stepped down, to be replaced by the great Eartha Kitt for the third and final year. Oh, those were the days. (PBS, 8 ET/PT)

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile